Topic Title

For a long time I've been happily using XREFs, largely for assembling typical dwelling unit plans and elevations into townhouse building drawings. Sometimes I've needed to explode Xrefs to symbols to make minor modifications to the base drawing particular to some atypical condition. That has been a joy, until today. Working a few minutes ago on an elevation symbol exploded from an Xref - from which I had erased all the other elevations on the original drawing - I realized it would make sense to combine the other related elevations on this symbol, make the changes affecting them, and then use the same symbol for the other elevations for this building. I've known all along the the symbols bound from Xrefs retain the name of the original drawing, with the .dsf extension, but had no idea how that might cause me trouble. First, I tried to open the original drawing, to copy the parts I'd need. The first time I tried that, and the file open window went away without bringing up the drawing, I thought I must have pressed Cancel instead of Open. The second time I realized that Datacad sees the drawing file name and the symbol name as being the same and assumes the file you want is already open. Evidently, it pays no attention to the extension. Annoying, but I thought I could get around that by saving the symbol with a different name. Saved symbol, that went OK. Then tried again to open the .aec file. Exciting fireworks! I got a really scary error message, which I think said something about the drive (on our network) had been trashed. That would have been a huge disaster. But that message went away, and the original symbol appeared, with its former name - the .dsf version of the .aec file name. Everything else seemed OK. So, I saved-as it with a new file name and .aec extension. And then I was able to load the original .aec file, without problems. But it seems to me that Datacad should be able to understand the difference between a .dsf file and an .aec file in situations like this. For what it's worth.